The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry

The Sewanee Review is proud to announce that for the first time the Aiken Taylor Award was given to two worthy poets in the same year. The 26th and 27th recipients of the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry are Debora Greger and William Logan. This year’s Aiken Taylor events took place March 19–21.

 Through the generosity of Dr. K. P. A. Taylor, the Sewanee Review established an annual award in 1987 honoring an accomplished American poet for the work of his or her career. Howard Nemerov was the first poet honored and was followed by Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and W. S. Merwin. Other recipients of this important prize (which cannot be applied for) include Gwendolyn Brooks, Maxine Kumin, Wendell Berry, and, more recently, Anne Stevenson, John Haines, Donald Hall, Louise Glück, and Billy Collins.

William Logan is a poet and literary critic known for formality and structure in his own writing and his sometimes scathing but always penetrating reviews. Born in Boston, Logan received a BA from Yale and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1975 he has published a vast amount of work—both criticism and poetry—in such major publications as the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Poetry, and the New Criterion. He is the author of nine books of poetry, beginning with Sad-Faced Men in 1982 and continuing on to Madame X (2012). Along with essays and reviews, Logan has also written and edited six books of criticism, the most recent of which is Our Savage Art, published in 2009. William Logan has served as a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida in Gainesville since 1983, and until 2000 he was the director of the creative writing program there.

Richard Tillinghast has described Logan as an “accomplished and original poet . . . [who] writes with vigor, almost classical restraint and a fine sense of musicality.” One reviewer of Logan’s first book of poetry described his style as a “tough-minded, authentically adventurous formalism.” Donald Hall, writing a review of Logan's Night Battle (1999) in the Iowa Review, said, "Logan writes like an angel—an elegant, literary angel." In the New York Times Book Review, David Barber praised Logan as "a hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim" who "can hold his own with just about anyone in vivisecting the vanity of human wishes with savage aplomb."

Owing to Logan’s use of formal style in his own poetry, he tends to save his positive reviews for such well-known and often deceased formalist poets as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He has, however, also praised some free-verse poets like Louise Glück. Logan reviews for the New York Times Book Review, and some of his more controversial statements have led Slate magazine to call him “the most hated man in American poetry . . . [and] its guiltiest pleasure.” However Poetry’s editor, Christian Wiman, seems to give the best analysis of the power of Logan’s criticism, saying, “William Logan is the best practical critic around. I sometimes disagree with his judgments fiercely, but that I so fiercely disagree, that his prose provokes such a response, is what makes him the best. Most criticism is like most poetry: it simply leaves you indifferent. I’ve seen Logan’s name bring bile to the lips of the gentlest spirits . . . For breadth of intelligence, an incisive style, and pure passion, I don’t think he can be matched." 

In addition to this year’s Aiken Taylor Award, William Logan also has been the recipient of these awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.